After the devastating Northern California wildfires, I found myself looking at AirNow multiple times a day. Also at work, like many Bay Area tech companies, we use HipChat (or Slack). Naturally I was inclined to issue a slash command to get the latest air quality index (AQI) for my area in a chat channel. I couldn’t find a good AQI bot so I wrote one.

Installation for Heroku is on the README of the project. How to add a slash command for HipChat and/or Slack are not covered in this blog entry, but it’s very easy 🙂 (I used /aq <zipcode> for command)

I turned iCloud Photo Library on this week. We have close to 250 GB of photos, videos in several different computers and mobile devices. You might have guessed it: it flooded our network since our outbound internet peaks around 6 Mbs (realistically). I needed to do something.

I have at home a Meraki MX65 and a MR42 (Thanks Dağhan 😉 ) They give great visibility and control over our home network. I can easily pinpoint where the problem is and take actions. Here is a great chart that shows how the nature of our traffic changed on Sep 24 after turning iCloud Photo Library on. (See the light blue? That’s increased upload!)

One of the easiest way to slow this traffic down is to shape it with Meraki Traffic Shaping rules. This document talks about in detail how to do this. However the iCloud settings in the canned traffic shaping rules is only related to backup and doesn’t work with iCloud Photo Library traffic.

Meraki allows you to do application layer or layer 3 traffic shaping. Since the traffic is encrypted, the application layer traffic shaping was not an option. For layer 3, I needed the IPs that the Photos app was talking to. Since Apple owns the entire 17.0.0.0/8, it’s always an option to craft your rule using the entire class A subnet. However that wouldn’t be “elegant” 🙂 So let’s do some tcpdump exercise.

What this tells us is that we captured 1000 packets and looked for all the ones that has “17.” in it, and counted them. In total 647 packets were transmitted to 17.248.128.44. Also it’s on port 443 only.

I did a similar packet dump for 10K packets. Which revealed that the sync between Photos app and iCloud is always happening on subnets: 17.248.0.0/16 and 17.188.0.0/16 on port 443. (There might be a more specific subnet, but this was enough for me to start with)

Let’s apply this to Meraki MX65 traffic shaping rules. In this rule below my upload limit per client is 1.5 Mbps. Depending on how many clients you have and your upload speed, you can come up with something more suitable for your network.

I use Chirp. I love it. It’s the only way to program my Baofeng UV-R(+) radios… Period.

Also I love that I can download repeater settings according to a zip code, county, state, etc…

I wanted to use Chirp for my Yaesu FTM-400XDR. However it looks like Chirp doesn’t support this model. So my initial reaction was to create the repeater list with Chirp, export on CSV, and import it to Yaesu.

But, that wasn’t possible either since Yaesu expects the data in a different order and format.

Today we are going to talk about a nasty topic: Puking. When input is not routed correctly, it becomes a nasty, dangerous projectile. And that’s exactly what happened when my almost 2 year old daughter started puking on our brand newish Recaro Performance Sport ChildSeat.

Your product acted like a champ!

Stopped the overflows in many layers, absorbed some of the half chewed blueberry leftovers, deflected some others. The smell and the colors of the grapes, almost fermented by the bodily juices and scorching sun, were very easy to clean since the different layers of fabric and foam were super easy to remove.

The designer team of the harnesses needs a raise or a trip to Hawaii or something like that. Where the harnesses meet the seat was designed so good that all I needed to do is to spray some fabric cleaner and use a toothpick to remove the oozy, jelly grape particles.

Overall, if you test your seats against puking, you already know you are doing a great job. If not, you can sleep very good tonight knowing that your product passed my daughter’s puking and my cleaning test!